


my brother in arms

by thatsparrow



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, M/M, Spoilers: Episode 61
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-17 23:10:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13669230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsparrow/pseuds/thatsparrow
Summary: Sometimes, Jacobi thinks Kepler has all the charisma of a thirty-second countdown, and he couldn't bring himself to look away if he tried.





	my brother in arms

**Author's Note:**

> title from "the soldiering life" by the decemberists

It's not like anything's ever happened, really—Kepler's far too much of a professional and even Jacobi's got enough sense in his ballistics-oriented brain to recognize it as an unequivocally bad idea—but that's not to say Jacobi's never _thought_ about it. Unplanned, usually, and typically an unwelcome thing — sneaking up on him with the speed of a sublight arc when he finds himself stationed near Kepler during a stealth mission, or stretched out in SI-5 sleeping bags on opposite sides of a low-burning campfire, or sharing too-little space during a stakeout in a four-door beige Honda picked for its inconspicuousness. Jacobi will be in the middle of mentally running through grenade specs, or playing hangman with Maxwell to kill the time, and then he'll become _aware_ of Kepler in a way he wasn't before. In a way he doesn't want, and doesn't mean to.

Kepler's hands, wrapped around the curves of a special-issue assault rifle. Palms callused and a few of the fingers twice-broken and Jacobi fixated to an unintended degree on the tendons shifting under the skin when Kepler's hands adjust and flex around the grip of the gun.

Kepler's eyes, shifting across the details of any new environment with a sure and ruthless efficiency. Irises bright under his dark lashes and watching Jacobi with the kind of sharp and level look that has him feeling like Kepler's dissembling him one piece at a time, prying apart the cracks in Jacobi's composure with a flat-head screwdriver.

Kepler's mouth, curved up in a humorless grin or half-open and pressed against the uncapped lip of the silver flask he keeps secreted in his inner left pocket. Razor blades tucked into the corners of his smile and honeyed half-truths always waiting on his tongue.

And then Jacobi will catch himself staring, or his hands will fumble thanks to this misplaced focus, and he'll tell himself to take a slow breath and to reel his thoughts back from these unsafe places. Fixates instead on the feel of copper filaments pinched between his fingers or the ache he's developing in his lower back from the design of the Honda's passenger seat. Chalks it up to a byproduct of working so closely with Kepler for so many years — their partnership requiring a kind of intimacy that's easy to mistake for something else.

Jacobi lies often enough that he finds it unsurprisingly easy to lie to himself.

Still, he doesn't know what to do when Kepler claps a hand to his shoulder or against his back, and Jacobi can feel the warmth of Kepler's touch seeping through his shirt and past his skin and stretching down to his fucking _nerves_. The feeling lingering like he's carrying Kepler's fingerprints branded onto his skin.

No, Jacobi doesn't know what the _fuck_ to do with that — and so he finds it best to just not think of it at all.

 

—

 

The first time he meets Kepler, it happens by chance at a shitty bar in a shitty corner of San Francisco, and it isn't until later that Jacobi finds out it wasn't by chance at all.

It's two in the afternoon on a Tuesday and Jacobi's perched on a bar stool because how else is he supposed to pass the time these days? Not like he has a job anymore. Not like there’s anyone who will take him in after he was so completely fucked over.

So instead, he’s here — half-perched on a bar-stool, half-bracing his weight against the hardwood, head spinning and throat still burning from whatever cheap brand of whiskey he's just thrown back. There's condensation beaded against his fingertips from the ice still sitting at the bottom of the glass, and most of Jacobi's attention is caught at the way it's catching the dim orange glow of the lights hung over the bar, fractured and blurred like headlights in a rainstorm. The bartender says something to him, and even though Jacobi's barely conscious of his own response, he's sure it's some variation of him being a dick.

Getting shitfaced in the middle of the day and acting like an asshole to anyone in a ten-foot radius — better known as the first two tracks on Daniel Jacobi's album of Greatest Hits.

It's then that he notices someone sliding into the stool at his left, cutting through the meandering curve of Jacobi's incoherent thoughts with a voice that's too loud and _way_ too fucking cheery to be in a dive like this in the middle of the day. Relentless in the face of Jacobi's monosyllables with a megawatt smile and these expressive hands that prove more distracting than Jacobi would be willing to admit.

(He doesn't know it's Kepler at the time and, later, that will always strike Jacobi as a funny thing — that there ever could have been a point in his life before he knew Warren Kepler.)

At first, he’s mostly just fucking _annoyed_ that this asshole won’t take a goddamn hint and _leave him alone_ — but then the stranger pulls out a wallet fat-enough to cover Jacobi’s tab ten times over, and there’s a glass of something honey-colored sitting in front of him, and it’s amazing how fast the taste of Balvenie washes the sour edge of anger out of Jacobi’s mouth. After that, it feels like the easiest thing in the world to spill his pathetic fucking life story to the man next to him, hanging on Jacobi’s words with a level of attention that’s more intoxicating than the expensive scotch still swilling around in his hand. Offering understanding that feels like the best kind of vindication.

(Jacobi knows his own history better than anyone, and knows it well-enough to recognize that it didn't merit the level of interest that Kepler gave it. He’ll realize later that this should’ve tipped him off.)

The stranger doesn’t stay long after Jacobi’s finished talking, pausing just long enough on his way to the door to give Jacobi a handshake and a smile that's more friendly than polite. And then he’s gone, Jacobi still sitting at the bar with two unfinished glasses of Balvenie in front of him, and that’s when he notices the off-white rectangle of a business card left on the hardwood. Jacobi’s not sober enough that reading the thing is exactly _easy_ , but even with the world blurred as it is, he manages to make out the words “Goddard Futuristics” spelled out in a modern typeface before he tucks the slip into his pocket and forgets about it until he’s searching for his keys when he gets home that night.

The feeling faded, eventually—gone for sure by the time of the _Sol_ 's arrival, and maybe some of the shine starting to rust away even at the boarding of the _Urania_ —but there was a time, lasting longer than a moment, when Jacobi was sure that Goddard was the best thing to happen to him. Picked him up from wallowing in self-pity and pulled the bottom-shelf whiskey from his hand and told him he mattered, and Jacobi doesn't know if anyone or anything else had ever done more for him till that point.

And if Goddard was a kind of salvation, then it really only followed to see Kepler as some sort of savior. Jacobi knows better than to build people into heroes—knows for a fucking _fact_ never to make that mistake with Kepler—but there's miles of middle ground between putting Kepler up on a pedestal and seeing the man as strictly his commanding officer, and Jacobi's pretty sure he's lived in that undefined space since they first met.

Which is maybe why it stings that much more to find out it wasn't a chance thing at all. Not the right spin of a roulette wheel, or three dollar signs scraped away under the silver of a scratch-off lottery card — nothing more than the work of a Goddard research team and someone tailing him who'd given Kepler the where and when. And, just like that, Jacobi's carefully built fantasy comes tumbling down, burying him in the rubble of concrete and rebar like any one of his well-timed explosives.

He doesn't know what hurts more — the truth of the thing (the one he always should've known, maybe consciously ignored), or the way Kepler lets on like he's unwrapping a pair of socks instead of taking a sledgehammer to Jacobi's bedrock.

"What, you think we just happened to bump into each other? Please. I knew everything about you."

It hurts in a way that's sharp and sudden and unexpected, like the first time he blew out his eardrums standing too close to a blast, or the bullet he took to the shoulder during a mission that turned ten different kinds of fucked-up. It hurts, but by now Jacobi knows better than to let something so trivial as pain show on his face.

Later that night, after they'd set off the fireworks and traded sips of spiced scotch from Kepler's flask, Jacobi goes home and tells himself it doesn't matter. That he doesn't care. That Kepler knows what he's worth now, and so however the fuck Jacobi ended up at Goddard shouldn't mean a damn in the long run.

He's good at lying to himself, but even so, this lie only half sticks.

Tucked in the back of his wallet is a creased piece of cream-colored card stock, bent at the corners and shot through with wrinkles, but Kepler's name under the "Goddard Futuristics" still reads clear as day. He thinks there's a faded stain on it from something that could be Balvenie, but he's not sure.

Jacobi never gets around to throwing it out.

 

—

 

Sometimes, Jacobi hates Kepler.

Sometimes — and the feeling of hating Kepler as unexpected and unplanned a thing as wanting him. Shooting up hot and fast like a sudden solar flare from any star orbited by a Goddard space station, or the supernova spark of a lit fuse sprinting down the wire. Teeth gritted so tight they threaten to crack if only to hold back all the sharp words left sitting on Jacobi's tongue. The kind of anger that has him debating the merits of putting a fist through the drywall, if only to do something with all the pent-up energy in his white-knuckled hands.

But it's got nothing to do with all the morally dubious shit Kepler's pulled, and that's counting all Jacobi knows of, and every penance-worthy line-item he's sure that Kepler's keeping from him. No, Jacobi's not quite so high-and-mighty as to give a fuck about any of that.

(Besides, it's not like he's got any right to cast stones. Not like he doesn't have his own collection of sins stamped with a Goddard seal of approval.)

So—no—that's not it. It isn't that Jacobi finds himself awake at 2 AM, overheating between Ikea sheets and face pressed into the cotton of the pillowcase, wishing that Kepler could be a fucking _better_ _man_. But Kepler's got this ability to compartmentalize like no one Jacobi's ever met, filing away every ugly incident and mission misstep and off-color emotion like sorting sharp lures into the neat metal drawers of a tackle-box. Shiny silver hooks still tipped with blood and Kepler tucking them away like the whole thing is just another Wednesday afternoon.

Sometimes, he hates Kepler — hates the way that Kepler shuts down a conversation and shifts gears while Jacobi's still reeling like he's wasted off the whiskey that Kepler's so fond of. Hates the way he'll have these ugly stains on his hands and a laundry list of unanswered questions and Kepler will just give him this flat stare and start talking about the best chocolate eclair he's ever had, waxing poetic about custard filling when his tone is really saying, "that's enough, Mr. Jacobi".

He wonders if Kepler hears the _fuck you_ that Jacobi sometimes tucks behind his _yes, sir_.

 

—

 

Sometimes, Jacobi hates Kepler. And, sometimes, Jacobi looks at Kepler, and thinks that he wouldn't know how to hate Kepler if he tried.

 

—

 

In the moments before he falls asleep, or when he's reheating a cardboard container of leftover takeout, Jacobi will close his eyes and let his mind wander back to the memory of his first SI-5 mission.

He'd say that he remembers every sensory detail in sharp HD clarity, but that'd be a lie. He doesn't remember how many flights of stairs they walked down, or the damp smell of the aged concrete thick in his nose, or the steady hum of machinery buzzing underneath every footfall or word exchanged between him and Kepler. He doesn't remember how Kepler disabled the two guards standing in the hall outside the lab, or what was written on the whiteboard screwed to the wall opposite the door — fuck, by now, Jacobi barely remembers what the whole goddamn mission was even _about_.

But even if most of the particulars have been sanded away, there are two things that Jacobi does still remember in sharp, saturated detail, and those he remembers for a fucking _fact_.

The first is the bomb — the second is Kepler. And even though the bomb came first—and the quiet _click_ of the thing arming itself scared Jacobi still worse than anything ever had—there's no question that, of the two, his memory of Kepler is the more important.

Kepler, clicking shut the lock inside the lab door, expression unfazed and tone unwavering and meanwhile Jacobi's heart beating hard enough to threaten punching a hole through his ribs. Kepler, calm and composed, asking the impossible of Jacobi in the same tone he uses when ordering a cup of coffee.

Kepler, with his steady hands and sure eyes, leaning against a stack of file cabinets while a timer starts running down from twelve minutes.

"Mr. Jacobi, please take that thing apart, quick as you like."

He'd never had someone look at him like that before — all unquestioning certainty and unequivocal trust, taking Jacobi's capabilities as such a matter of course. Jacobi knows if there was ever a moment when Kepler earned his loyalty—and earned it with the gamble of his own life to prove Jacobi's talents as a winning hand—it was then and there. He'd believed in himself to get the job done because _Kepler_ had believed in him, and that was a level of confidence so undeserved and so unwarranted that Jacobi wasn't sure there was a way to ever pay it back. Not like he could offer Kepler his thanks. Not like Kepler would take it.

So he'd shown Kepler his gratitude in the only way he could, turning back to the detonator, and disassembling the thing until it was no more threatening than a handful of spare parts stored on a garage workbench.

By now, his loyalty to Kepler has stopped feeling like something owed. Now, Jacobi gives it because he wants to.

 

—

 

(Jacobi doesn't know that, later, he'll find himself standing on the bridge of a ship named the _Sol_ , air feeling heavy with the weight of Rachel Young's words, wondering at what point Kepler became a stranger to him.

He'll want to blame it on the arrival of Pryce and Cutter — that Kepler was abiding by his own sense of loyalty, and that surely there were moments when Jacobi's allegiance to Kepler seemed an equally misguided thing.

But, no — because the Kepler that he knows would never be so naive as to fall in line when living in the palm of Cutter's hand is such an uncertain promise. Jacobi will go back further, to the shitstorm that saw Lovelace shot and Hilbert ripped apart and Maxwell _gone,_ and Jacobi will see that event as the moment when the last fragile threads tying him to Kepler frayed in two. Still, even when his tone ran easy, Jacobi would never call Kepler cavalier with either of their lives, and so blaming the death of Maxwell will seem equally inaccurate as blaming Pryce and Cutter. It'd be the straightforward answer, but that doesn't make it _true_.

He'll wonder again when he stopped seeing anything familiar in the flat black of Kepler's eyes.

Then, Jacobi will watch Kepler and Young walk back towards the _Hephaestus_ , security systems on the _Sol_ newly calibrated to Minkowski's authorization, and Kepler will throw one last lifeline in Jacobi's direction — whether because his concern is genuine, or because it's another move in Cutter's chess game, Jacobi won't know and won't care. And even though there will be a dull ache from a recently-bandaged gunshot wound in his right thigh, and syrup-thick exhaustion sitting heavy in muscles, Jacobi won't be so far gone that he can't understand the rationale Kepler's offering behind his words.

It's about self-preservation. It's _selfish_.

He'll stare at Kepler, seeing him for what feels like the first time, and he'll understand that it didn't take a tragedy or a wrong roll-of-the-dice to send Kepler stumbling past the point of no-return. That Kepler walked across that particular line with his eyes wide-open.

That, maybe, he never really knew Kepler at all.)

 

—

 

After it's over—Cutter dead, and Pryce dead in a different way—Jacobi and Lovelace and Hera search the _Hephaestus_ for any last survivors. They never find Kepler's body, but they do find Young's, gutshot and still bleeding in front of one of the airlocks, and it's not hard to figure out the rest.

By the time they're aboard the _Urania_ , watching the _Hephaestus'_ orbit drift closer to Wolf 359 like water slowly spiraling down a drain, Jacobi's almost convinced himself that he doesn't care. Kepler surely deserved whatever he got, and it wasn't so long ago that Jacobi was angling for Kepler's death himself, and so who gives a fuck if all Kepler earned was an unceremonious execution, or if his body is still floating like a frozen rag-doll somewhere in the black.

(Jacobi tells everyone he's fine, but they don't bring up Kepler often, and he doesn't think that's a coincidence).

He's running his last inspections on the _Urania_ 's engines—triple-checking that it's still got the legs to take them back to Earth—when he hears Hera softly clearing her voice from the comms speaker by the door. She tells him that, at the end, someone had rerouted power from the _Hephaestus'_ pulse beacon to her processor. She says she can't be sure it was Kepler, but that the odds point to him likelier than anyone else.

Her voice is steady, if a little quiet. She just thought that Jacobi might like to know.

(His hands stutter in their work when Hera mentions Kepler's name, but Jacobi tells himself it's only a coincidence.)

He doesn't know if he believes Hera — doesn't know whether believing her would be wishful thinking, or some next-level naivety, and doesn't much like either option. Jacobi wonders if it even matters that Kepler may have done one good thing at the very end, and if that could really outweigh all the bad.

He tells himself he doesn't care, but as he's settling back into the cryo-pod and waiting to slip into stasis, it's the last thought on his mind — the unlikely and improbable chance that Kepler might've been a decent man.

 

—

 

Three weeks after their arrival back on Earth, Jacobi buys a small bottle of Balvenie, and drives somewhere quiet enough that the horizon line is lost in the dark and the stars are shining brighter than his headlights. He parks at the first scenic overlook he finds off the two-lane highway, and sits on the back of his car with his collar folded up against the sharp chill on the back of his neck, sipping straight from the bottle as he turns Kepler's business card over in his hands.

Jacobi knows well how to lie to himself, but this time, he doesn’t pretend that the sting in his throat belongs to the January wind or to the kick of the alcohol or any other fucking thing. Just sits there in the quiet, wondering if Kepler's mouth would have tasted like scotch, and raises a silent toast to the empty sky.

**Author's Note:**

> the scene at the bar comes from "things that break other things"
> 
> the scene with the fireworks and kepler's dialogue comes from "mission mishaps: no complaints"
> 
> thanks @gabriel urbina for absolutely wrecking me with the finale


End file.
